Block your website content from Google Search results

Temporarily block content from Google Search results

Trying to get the right version of your site indexed? Clean up old pages? The URL blocking tool is not for you. Learn more

This article describes how to use the Temporary URL Blocking tool, which we have created to help you address urgent content changes that need immediate attention in Google Search results. The tool does not actually remove content from either your site or the Google index, but blocks older, sensitive content from search results until we discover and index the updates to your site. Typically, a successful request blocks content for approximately 90 days from approval.

Before you begin

Before using the temporary URL blocking tool, you should first address content changes on your own site. For example, you should do one of the following:

Enter the relative path of the desired image, page or directory—not the absolute URL—and click Continue.

The next screen displays the complete URL of the content to be blocked. Choose one of the following:

Remove from search results and cache–Blocks a page or image entirely

Remove directory–Blocks the directory from both search results and cache

Remove from cache–Blocks the cached copy and search snippet

Click Submit Request.

Your request will appear in the list with an initial status set to Pending. Visit this page to check the status of your request. If your request has been denied, click Learn more to see the explanation. For example, your request might have failed because the URL you submitted didn’t meet the requirements for the type of blocking you requested, or you may need to make a different type of request in order to successfully block a specific URL.

Removal is not instant

Remember that after content is actually removed from any site (including Google-owned properties like Google+), or after you request a block of outdated content, certain search queries can still display the older content until our robots revisit that particular site.

Google Search regularly crawls the web to rebuild our index. Our crawl process is completely automated, and any number of factors can affect the crawl frequency of individual sites, so we’re unable to provide an estimate of when we’ll next crawl this page. We appreciate your patience during this process.

To make sure removal is permanent

Keep in mind that our crawlers will continue to crawl your site (and others) for content. Make sure your removal is permanent: address the questions and suggestions below within 90 days of requesting removal. Otherwise, your content might later reappear in search results. (More information about blocking access to your files.)

Is the page still linked to from other domains? Use robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling it. Even if a page is disallowed by robots.txt, we might still index its URL if we find a link to that page on another site. If you want to prevent the page from appearing in our results, designate the page as one not to be indexed using the noindex meta tag.

Can the same content be found with different URLs on your site? It’s fairly common for identical or similar content to appear on multiple pages. In this case, repeat the steps above for the other relative URLs for your content. Remember that URLs are case sensitive. Requesting a block for http://www.example.com/embarrassingstuff.html is not the same as requesting a block for http://www.example.com/EmbarrassingStuff.html. (Learn How to find the right URL.)